descry

Ever wonder what goes into building an effective
visualization? Look no further. We decided to roll up our sleeves
and explore the topic. We're calling it Project Descry.

Project Descry demonstrates the power of data and information
visualization as a communication tool. As a part of Descry,
we are releasing a set of open source, web-based visualizations
and an article written by the Jon Udell that serves as a broad
introduction to the topic.

Explore

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The Visualizations

You've probably heard that there's an obesity
epidemic going on in the United States. Every wondered how
bad it is? We mined the data from a CDC study on the topic
and its unnerving.

This visualization takes an interactive infographic approach
to presenting the obesity trend in the US since the mid-eighties.
Each state is represented by a tee shirt, and the size of
the tee shirt is proportional to the percentage of population
that has a BMI over 30.

It is said that a presidents first 100 days
in office are a good indicator of the term to come. If so,
what do their first words tell us?

Their First Words lets you explore every inaugural speech
since George Washington's. Ever wondered who talked about
"liberty" more than any other president? This visualization
answers that by letting you query the set of speeches for
a set of words and phrases that represent the notion of
"liberty". If regular expressions are your thing, it accepts
those, too.

Sometimes the best possible way to visualize
something really complex is to create a high-resolution
supergraphic. But then you are faced with the problem of
sharing it over the Internet.

A Website Named Desire is a printed supergraphic that
illustrates the process of launching a web site. This visualization
allows you to explore a 100 megapixel digital version of
the poster with interactive annotations to add context to
the nuances of the illustration.

Your group of friends subscribe to numerous
social networks making it difficult to keep track of what
their up to. Wouldn't it be great to explore all the data
in one place?

Social Timeline presents an aggregation of your social
network activity in the form of a timeline. It grabs the
data from FriendFeed, plots it on a timeline and allows
you to seamlessly navigate and filter it; all made possible
by an intelligent combination of caching and virtualization
built into the Social Timeline application.